Samobójcy Fiodora Dostojewskiego

Abstract

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was the first eminent Russian thinker who began to view a suicidal act as one of the prominent ethic problems. He projected the results of doubtfulness in God as well as the immortality of the soul by assuming that God does not exist, and man – gaining god’s rights – is elevated as the master of the entire world. Dostoyevsky’s works unveil further visions of reality. They are all combined by a common finale – complete devaluation, which consistently and unavoidably leads to an annihilation of the world in the social context, and to a malefaction and suicide – in individual one. Dostoyevsky created picture of suicides who accommodate themselves in the center of the s u ic ide -ge nerat i ng spac e, which is read as an aggregate of the dynamically shaped circumstances and conditions that inevitably push an individual being toward self-annihilation – this entails a gradual unveiling of this person’s inner world. The final act comes to be a fatal denouement of the whirl of interrelated acts, phenomena, events, attitudes, reactions, thoughts, etc. The suicide-generating space, weaving an immanent and a transcendent world together, is formed by the life choices of the suicides all doomed to die. The suicide is therefore not the one who ends his or her life here and now, but, rather, an individual who is embedded in a dynamically emerging suicide-generating space, and is thus experiencing mutual relationships with all its components. A suicide in Dostoyevsky creates an independent entity that is rooted at the point of intersection of three layers – that is, axiological, ontological, and psychological one. This person turns to be a semantic-ideal universum framed within his or her body. This universum is a reflection of a multifaceted, deepened reflection upon the real as well as metaphysical world. Thus depicted, the protagonist focuses on and simultaneously condenses the intellective as well as extra-rational knowledge about the real world. The protagonist functions as a prism which sees into Dostoyevsky’s philosophy, mysteries of human nature and soul revealed by him, as well as his reflections on the social and political matters. The book comprises five parts – these are: Introduction, Russia in the mid-nineteenth century and the issue of the suicide; Types of suicides, Suicides in Dostoyevsky, and Suicides and their social contexts. The part entitled Russia in the mid-nineteenth century and the issue of the suicide is an attempt at looking into Russia in Dostoyevsky times, and its description through the prism of the semantic triangle, whose cusps are formed by Dostoyevsky himself along with the two notions: suicide and atheism. This part deals with the essence, form and special character of atheism, and aside from that, its sources and ramifications. Moreover, this part depicts other reasons for the intensified suicidal acts, as well as suicide in the context of the religious history of Russia in the opinions of Russian eminent thinkers (Solovyov, Berdyaev), and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the main. The part Types of suicides makes an attempt at classifying the personae of suicides who appear in the works penned by the author of The Brothers Karamazov. The classification is based on the concepts of types of suicides defined in terms of suicidology and psychology, as well as others, unaccepted in the studies on suicide, successfully serving as tools of literary description. The book points to and provides characteristics of five categories of suicides – namely, calculating egotistic, logical, fatal, escapist, and spiritual one. To the categorization proposed in the book the author adds a typical suicidal model that appears in Dostoyevsky. An extensive chapter Suicides in Dostoyevsky, which gives the title to the book, constitutes its main body. It comprises twelve separate sketches devoted to the leading suicides penned by the writer (their order of appearance matches the chronology of the works where they appear). The purpose of the proposed analyses is to provide detailed insights into a gradual intensification of the suicide-generating space, an also attribute its components with semantic content. Furthermore, the analyses point to broadly understood contexts. Suicide is treated here as a medium which enlivens the truth about moral, spiritual, and social condition of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Insofar as portrayals of prominent suicides convey messages that are ethically ennobling and archetypical, the other suicides, who insinuate the ordinary and universal nature of this phenomenon, perform the role of a looking-glass of the society. Therein hide all the most essential problems of the nineteenth-century Russian reality. This problem is discussed in the part entitled Suicides and their social contexts that crowns the book.